Russia hunts metro bombers
RUSSIA: Russian authorities were hunting for two suspected terrorists last night after a bomb blast on the Saint Petersburg subway system killed 14 people and wounded dozens.
The explosion, which struck a crowded metro train near the historic city centre at 2.20pm local time, came as Vladimir Putin was visiting the city.
Shortly afterwards police discovered a larger, unexploded device at one of the city’s busiest metro stations, prompting authorities to close the entire underground transport system.
Witnesses on board the crowded train said it was shaken by a ‘‘thundering clap’’ that filled the carriages with smoke shortly after it left the station.
‘‘We all moved to the opposite end of the wagon, people jammed together and two women passed out. This all was happening while the train was still moving. It didn’t stop,’’ Polina, a student who was in the neighbouring carriage, told online news outlet Gazeta.ru.
‘‘A blast occurred at Sennaya Ploshchad metro station,’’ was the stark police message to Russian news agency Tass. ‘‘Several people have been injured.’’
The driver of the train won praise for deciding to continue to the next station, Technologichesky Institute, rather than stopping in the tunnel - a move that investigators said probably saved lives and made it easier for rescuers to reach the injured.
Photographs from the station platform showed a blue train carriage with its door mangled and twisted by the force of the blast.
Videos posted on social media showed a carriage wreathed in smoke and dazed and frightened passengers trying to exit the subway tunnels, while others knelt over the bodies of the wounded and the dead.
’’People were bleeding, their hair burnt. We were told to move to the exit, because the movement stopped,’’ a witness told Russia’s Life News.
‘‘People just fled. My girlfriend was in the next car that exploded. She said that it began to shake. When she came out, she saw that people were mutilated.’’
The Russian president, who was meeting his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko in a suburb of St Petersburg at the time, expressed his condolences after the ‘‘possible terror attack’’. ’’The city authorities, and if needed, the federal authorities, will take the necessary measures to help the families of those affected by the blast,’’ he said. ’’The reasons behind it are not clear yet, and so it would be premature to speak about them,’’ he cautioned.
Later, security sources told the Interfax news agency that the device was ‘‘homemade’’ with a blast equivalent to 200g of TNT. It appeared to have been packed full of shrapnel including metal nuts and bolts to cause maximum damage and had been left in the carriage in a backpack by the attacker, investigators said.
A second bomb, disguised as a fire extinguisher, was later found at the Ploshchad Vosstanaya metro station, which serves the mainline railway station that connects St Petersburg with Moscow.
The device, which apparently failed to explode, was reported to contain about one kilo of TNT equivalent, prompting speculation that it was intended as the main attack. The Investigative Committee, Russia’s senior security agency, opened a terrorism investigation and issued search warrants for two people in connection with the attack.
The suspects were believed to have each planted one of the devices, the Interfax news agency reported.
Russian media published CCTV images of a bearded man they claimed was one alleged attacker.
Law enforcement agencies did not immediately confirm whether the man pictured was one of the suspects.
No group had so far claimed responsibility for the blast.
However the intelligence agency in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan later identified a suspect behind the bombing as a Kyrgyz-born Russian citizen. A spokesman for the GKNB security service identified the suspect as Akbarzhon Jalilov, born in the city of Osh in 1995. He provided no other details. Kyrgyzstan, a predominantly Muslim Central Asian nation of six million, is Russia’s close political ally and hosts a Russian military airbase.
Russia’s transport infrastructure has been repeatedly targeted by Islamist terror groups based in the North Caucasus over the past two decades.
Yesterday’s attack was the deadliest outside the Caucasus since two suicide bombers killed 32 people in the southern city of Volgograd in December 2013.
St Petersburg was last struck by terrorism in October 2015, when a bomb on board a civilian airliner travelling from Egypt killed 224 people, many of them holidaymakers from the city.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for that attack, calling it revenge for Russia’s military intervention in Syria.
St Petersburg authorities suspended metro services following the blasts and stepped up security at the city’s international airport.
Georgy Poltavchenko, the governor of St Petersburg, announced three days of official mourning beginning today. Taxi and Uber drivers in the city were offering free rides to passengers stranded by the transport disruption. - Telegraph Group